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Dec 27, 2019 Web Exclusive By Ed McMenamin

The shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave have replicated themselves ad infinitum in the digital age. Total image over-saturation is here, as director Wim Wenders’ film Until the End of the World feared in 1991: our culture is electronic replications upon replication, blotting context until the only context for an image is another image. We gather reflections of ourselves and see reality in the mind’s eye staring back. This relentless inventory of images began in 1839, Susan Sontag wrote, “and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems … the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads — as an anthology of images.”

A major character in Wenders’ apocalyptic science fiction epic Until the End of the World is on such a quest to catalogue the world in images. He has a camera that takes photos the blind can see, and he spans the globe using it to collect images for his blind mother. After all, television and cinema might insist, what use was it to be alive in the 20^th century if you could not share in the language of images? Wenders was concerned with the answer to a similar question: what happens when the image is more important than the written word?

Until the End of the World was both late and early to the funeral for the written word when it was released in 1991 — it was after television and the CNN-gamification of politics and news, yet before the internet, social media, Instagram, emojis. The film takes Godard’s comment that “the best way to criticize a film is to make a film,” and attmpes to make a McLuhanian argument that images, or image bombardment, were replacing the written word in human culture at the dawn of the 20th century.

The irony in condemning audio-visual culture through an audio-visual medium was not lost on Wenders, who referred to the exercise as a Quixotic swing at windmills, even as he held his film with close affection. The Cervantes reference, used by Wenders in a 2001 interview included in the new Criterion edition, could certainly also describe the history of the film itself.

Originally released theatrically in 1991 as a severally edited, 158-minute cut (derided by the director as the “Reader’s Digest” version) to appease the studio, the ruminative adventure was far more expensive to make than any of the director’s previous films. Shot across nine countries and four continents over the course of an entire year, the short edit was a box office failure and critical non-starter — Roger Ebert remarked that a documentary about the production would have likely been more entertaining than the film itself.

In ‘94, Wenders presented his nearly five-hour long director’s cut, but aside from film festivals and art house theaters, it was largely unavailable in the U.S. until this new Blu-ray edition from Criterion.

Until the end of the World has been described as the “ultimate road movie,” but it has more in common with hyper-interconnected, post-modern novels than Wenders’ well-regarded road pictures of the ‘70s and ‘80s: There are stretches on the open road, but much more time is spent jet-setting from France to Italy to Portugal to Germany to Russia, China, Japan, the U.S. and finally Australia; there is a nuclear satellite at risk of crashing into Earth; there are the recorded dreams of Australian aborigines; and finally, there is the camera that can make blind people see.

It begins with the story of Claire (Solveig Dommartin), a French woman searching for purpose, running from a cheating boyfriend, Eugene (Sam Neill). She dallies with excess in Venice, suffers a car wreck with two friendly bank robbers and a bag of money, and eventually crosses paths with Sam Farber (William Hurt), a man on the run from bounty hunters, the CIA and others who want to reclaim the aforementioned camera.

She follows Sam Farber across the world as he records images to take home to his mother (Jeanne Moreau) and inventor father (Max Von Sydow) who wait in an underground techno-bunker in the middle of the Outback. Spurned Eugene, along with a private investigator and a series of other side characters equally enthralled by Claire, follow her above and then below the equator, where she and Farber become addicted to watching videos of their own recorded dreams like television.

“In the beginning was the word,” Eugene says, quoting the Book of John, near the conclusion of Until the End of the World. “I was now afraid that the apocalypse would read: In the end were only images.”

Eugene is clearly the onscreen proxy for Wenders. And this line, spoken while Claire and Farber fall into addiction, makes a tidy summary of Wenders’ thesis. He sees Eugene as the main character, he said in the interview, and when the film was cut for the original theatrical run, Eugene had nearly disappeared along with his voice-over narration. Suddenly, Claire was the main character. The director’s cut restores Eugene to the front of the film, at least in Wenders’ mind. To the viewer, the film is still very much Claire’s story. Eugene is but a chronicler of Claire’s adventure, writing a novel of the events depicted on screen as they happen. At certain points, it becomes unclear why Eugene is even in the film from a narrative perspective, his motivations reduced from following Claire for love to merely idling on the margins with a typewriter, documenting the journey.

When Eugene presents the novel to her as an attempted cure for her dream addiction, she asks, What happens now? He tells her that it’s up to her, that he merely watched her “dance across the globe.” It’s fascinating that Wenders can’t see the center of his own epic.

Also at the center are the strikingly beautiful frames we expect from Wenders. No one shoots blue skies and perfect puffs of white clouds above a desert horizon like the German auteur and his regular cinematographer Robby Müller. Music, as well, plays a familiarly memorable roll. Wenders recruited 16 artists including the Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Can, Nick Cave and U2 to compose original songs, with the instruction to write music imagining how they would sound in the 1999 setting for the film. The onscreen characters, as well, form an ad hoc world-music band in the desert, combing aboriginal instruments with jazz drumming, guitar, piano and harmonica, improvising as nuclear annihilation hangs in the balance, and the modern world spins out of control thousands of miles away.

These sublime moments of warmth and humanity overwhelm any techno-dystopian withdrawal occurring in the lab bunker just underneath their feat, where Claire and Farber’s dreams take shape in psychedelic swirls of HD pixels. That Wenders worked for weeks on-then state-of-the art HD-video dream sequences is another irony likely not lost on a director who feared the replicable, infinite black hole of digital-media saturation.

In the hands of a practiced consciousness distorter like David Cronenberg, the digital transmigration of self, identity and reality could have taken on the visual language necessary to convey the full horror of Wenders’ end vision. Wenders is a gentler filmmaker, and instead the narrative retreats to Eugene and his typewriter and voice-over narration. Wenders’ own distrust of images had infected his ability to tell the story in the way demanded by the very medium he was bound to. Swinging at windmills, indeed.

(criterion.com/films/28767-until-the-end-of-the-world)

Follow Ed McMenamin on twitter at @edmcmenamin.